St. Augustine Distillery opens Friday

Standing near two column-and-kettle copper pot stills, guide Lou Agresta leads a tour for local business owners of the St. Augustine Distillery on Feb. 26. The distillery opens to the public at 10 a.m. Friday.

St. Augustine Distillery's first batch of vodka is available for sale at the end of the tour. Individuals are only allowed to purchase two bottles of St. Augustine Distillery spirits a year, by state law.

The vodka’s in the bottles, the bourbon’s in the barrels. Now it’s time for the tourists.

St. Augustine Distillery opens Friday.

Mike Diaz, co-founder and chief financial officer, said he’s hoping to get at least 75,000 visitors a year to take the tour through the renovated building on Riberia Street.

The plan is this: Tourists and locals come to the distillery, take the tour, sample the wares and leave having purchased not just souvenirs (yes, exit through the gift shop) but the liquor itself.

Because of legislation passed last year, each person is allowed to buy two bottles a year at the distillery. In the past, they’d have to buy it at a liquor store.

The St. Augustine distillery spearheaded that change and Diaz said he’d like to see that limit raised eventually, but right now he’ll settle for two bottles. The hope is that visitors might go home and keep buying it there.

“The whole idea of any consumer product is consumer trial,” Diaz said. “Instead of spending money on magazine ads or girls in bikinis going to bars and pouring shots, this gives us more time. We have people for half an hour, we educate them, have them sample and hopefully go home with a bottle.”

Like the winery boom, followed by the brewery boom, small craft distilleries are seeing their own explosion. There were 68 craft distilleries in the United States a decade ago, according to the American Distilling Institute. Now there are close to 10 times that many.

The partners behind St. Augustine Distillery have spent about $2.8 million so far renovating the old building, buying the equipment and starting the business. There are 24 employees, 13 of whom are tour operators, because it all starts with the tours.

They’ll be every 30 minutes during the week, every 20 minutes on weekends.

The tour starts with a small museum that tells a variety of stories, from the history of the building (an ice plant dating back to 1917) to a history of spirits, both distilling and selling, in Florida. Jacksonville, it turns out, was a hotbed of the mail-order liquor business early in the last century. Companies like the Butler Brothers, Chas. Blum and Co and W.F. Seebar had offices downtown mailing out quarts to customers elsewhere.

Then it’s on to a darkened room for an eight-minute video that focuses on the distillery’s connection to Florida farms. Sugarcane from KYV Farm in St. Johns County and Harrison Farms in Marianna, winter wheat from Wells Brothers Farm in St. Johns County, corn from Rogers Farm in St. Johns.

Visitors will then walk into the distillery where grains are cooked in a 750-gallon tank and transferred to fermenters where they bubble away for three to six days. Finally, the two big copper distillers pull out the purpose of all this: the alcohol. So far, the distillery has bottled about 6,000 bottles of vodka. There’s no aging with that — seven days from grain to bottle.

And Diaz said he expects that to grow to 20,000 bottles by the end of the month.

The whiskey made so far is in 10 50-gallon barrels, where it will stay for at least four years. Though it was just put up in December, the clear liquid is already taking on color from the wood.

They’re pretty proud of that wood. It’s thicker than that in most bourbon barrels, so the barrels cost almost $300 apiece — $100 more than a mass distiller like Jim Beam spends, Diaz said.

“That’s really only 50 cents a bottle,” he said. “For someone like Beam, that’s a lot of money. But not for us. We’re not trying to compete with them on price.”

The bourbon will eventually sell in the $50-$60 range. The vodka is $28 for one bottle, $50 for two. Gin will be coming this summer and rum later in the fall, Diaz said.

Visitors can buy the vodka in the tasting room, where they are given samples and shown a few cocktail techniques. And then there’s the gift shop: T-shirts and a lot of stuff involving cocktails — mixers, shakers, books and molds to make the really big ice cubes that are so trendy right now.

The distillery has a distributor in Premier Beverage, but isn’t shipping anything out yet.

“There’s no demand for it, yet,” Diaz said. “But when they go home and think about what a great time they had in St. Augustine, hopefully they’ll buy it again.”